HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.
![handle is hein.gao/gaobadnxj0001 and id is 1 raw text is:
Comptroller General
0oI of the United States
Washington, D.C. 20548
IJTO~
Decision
Matter of: Cable Television Costs
File: B-239774
Date: July 22, 1991
DIGEST
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) may use its appropriated
funds to reimburse employee for cable television service
installed in the employee's home; the cable service primarily
benefitted the government by enabling the FTC to increase its
monitoring of advertising.
DECISION
This responds to a-request from the Director, Division of
Budget and Finance, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), regarding
the use of FTC's appropriated funds to pay for cable
television installed in an employee's home. / FTC would like to
reimburse an FTC employee for the installation and monthly
service charges associated with cable television installed in
the employee's home because the cable service was for FTC's
exclusive use in monitoring advertising on cable television.
Although, as a general rule, agencies may not pay for
employees' personal equipment or utility costs, FTC may pay
for the cable television charges in this case because the
cable service was primarily for the benefit of the government.
BACKGROUND
One of the FTC's principal functions is to safeguard the
public by preventing the dissemination of false or deceptive
advertisements. 15 U.S.C. §§ 45(a), 52 (1988). In
furtherance of this objective, FTC monitors advertising on
network, cable, and independent television. In the late
1980s, cable television was not available at FTC headquarters
in Washington, D.C. For several years, FTC monitored
advertising on cable television by relying on Commission staff
who had cable service to volunteer their time and equipment to
perform this function. FTC considered this approach unsatis-
factory for several reasons including, for example, the fact
that employees were not available to tape certain specified
time periods and there were programming capability limita-
tions on some privately owned video cassette recorders which
made multiple taping difficult. As stated in FTC's letter to
our Office, [t]he cumulative result of all these problems is
that we do less monitoring than we should of cable and
B-239774](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.gao/gaobadnxj0001&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)